Consolidating IT for the best enterprise solutions

Technological innovations drive new products. Mergers and acquisitions add disparate and redundant technology. These and myriad other changes come faster and faster, accelerating the importance of an enterprise that can adapt to the changes.

IT infrastructures built over the past decades were designed to be stable, not to react quickly to change. With such an infrastructure it is generally easier to add more hardware to solve immediate and tactical issues. But that means IT departments spend nearly half of the time implementing stop-gap fixes to outmoded solutions that do not keep up with yesterday's demands, let alone today's.

Then how does the enterprise adapt to rapid, constant change? With an IT environment that flexes and bends to the dynamic needs of the enterprise. In such an environment, IT provides a single set of dynamically scalable resources and services into which the business taps whenever necessary.

As a result, the enterprise becomes increasingly agile and responsive to the demands of commerce, and realizes a greater return on investment for technology.

As the IT department builds toward utility computing, it must still provide continuous and secure operations that are managed intelligently, dynamically and effectively, as well as optimized continually to meet service levels and support. It is also very likely that the department must do all of that with reduced staff and budget.

The most effective way to meet the contradictory demands of delivering more with less is by consolidating or reducing the complexity of the IT infrastructure. IT consolidation optimizes and streamlines the environment. The result enhances the adaptability of the enterprise to meet the constantly changing demands of the marketplace.

Depending on the enterprise's infrastructure integration and its business objectives, HP approaches consolidation as a four-stage process - collocation, hardware/data integration, application integration and IT utility. At every stage of consolidation HP's offerings incorporate the benefits listed above.

Bringing widely distributed systems into fewer, centralized locations is an important step that pays off quickly. An international shipping company recently saved ten million euros per year by consolidating twenty data centers into two.

To save physical space and to enhance its overall capacity and availability in its data center, a U.S. airline consolidated. It reaped one-time cost savings of more than two million dollars, and recurring savings of over a million dollars per year on reduced maintenance, management costs, and fewer software licenses.

Server integration reduces the number of systems when more powerful servers of the same architecture host a single application or multiple instances of a single application. Centralized storage yields optimized performance and availability, while lowering overall operating costs.

An American financial institution replaced seventeen servers with four HP Superdome servers, cutting total cost of ownership, increasing return on assets and saving floor space. The bank also reduced maintenance and licensing costs, eliminated obsolete hardware, increased scalability, and enhanced capacity planning and availability, as it enhanced customer services and cut time to market for new products.

This is the very reason why HP has chosen assets such as manageability, utilization, virtualization and security to differentiate itself in the market that is moving rapidly toward a unified digital infrastructure.

Equally important, through analysis and qualitative tools, HP's IT Consolidation Services help provide an understanding of tactical and strategic ramifications of solutions so that changes are enacted that deliver increased productivity, improved service levels and superior cost efficiency.

IT Consolidation Services uses an iterative approach that maps to specific immediate and future business requirements. They provide a depth of design, delivery and management support to ensure increased infrastructure adaptability.

Consolidation of any magnitude often introduces change to an entire corporate culture. By initiating a plan that addresses the IT environment as a whole - its people, processes, and technology - the enterprise will realize a level of consensus between IT and business that makes the company more adaptive. Working with HP ensures that just such a plan is successfully implemented.

Whatever consolidation steps the IT department follows, an adaptive enterprise needs a flexible IT infrastructure - one that makes the enterprise more agile and better able to meet the constantly changing demands of the marketplace.

Through successful implementation of hundreds of consolidation efforts, HP has the experience to help other companies architect, integrate, manage and evolve their IT infrastructures.